Last year there were hundreds of tents here, and then they went away, and then a handful came back, and then they all had to leave again, about a month or two ago, and now, we have just this one:

That’s the update from yesterday…

(So the Super Bowl L corporate party, which cost us a lot more than initially advertised oh well, plus the fear of a big El Nino (plus the rise of cheap $25 fiberglass-poled tents handed out in a semi-organized effort with assistance from at least one Morning Zoo-type radio station’s van – Choochi in the Morning, or something, led to the huge Tent City of 2015-2016, then media coverage led to a big crackdown, then were no tents at all, then they started coming back, say around July 2016, then they got cleared out again, by the San Francisco Clean Team and assorted DPW trucks and whathaveyou and now the people that first got kicked out of the Embarcadero / Financial, and then from Under the 101, twice, are filtering back north and east from the Mission District – this is my understanding.)

“When I was mayor, I had the Department of Public Works send the street sweepers down Market Street at 3 a.m. If you were sleeping on the streets, you knew that water truck was coming. I never got in any trouble for it, because at the same time I was spraying the homeless…”

Market looks like this after a few runs from an early morning water truck or two:

But look at this – just the other day the driver of a water truck deliberately drove around this steam grate on Market inbound near 4th so as to not spray this guy:

Should Recology be driving and stopping their garbage trucks in the slow lane of inbound Market during the morning drive? Nope. (And the same goes for the street sweepers working on Market in the daytime – I’ve never seen that until this year.)

And are the “beautiful” obsolete “Pedmount” news racks helping here? What do you think. Is the advertising on them “beautiful?”

I guess “downtown” is a generic term? ‘Cause I don’t know where Frisco’s downtown is. I know that “uptown” was supposed to be in the Tenderloin, but the attempt to get that new-school appellation to take off failed. Badly.

Anyway, the DST is supposed to “leave the big stuff for [Frisco’s] DPW,” or so I overheard.

I suppose this kind of effort would make area billionaire / longtime Republican Ron Conway happy…

Well, let’s go way back for starters, back when the Bicycle Thieves Of San Francisco aimed to steal your entire bike. They’d sometimes get caught with stolen bikes and car jacks.*

But these days, it’s bike parts thieves seem to settle for, so cyclists need to protect not just the frame but also the wheels, the saddle and the headset, and other bits too, if you can.

So that means that today’s bike thief needs room to store stuff and that’s where Division Street comes in. It’s been a good place to park a vehicle or pitch a tent without being bothered too much, plus it’s close to the action – it’s close to 7th and Market and the Main Library.

This is what things looked like under the I-80 before Fall 2015 as I remember things:

This is how I remember things being for a decade or two.

But then all of a sudden, instead of a few tents here and there, a bunch of tents popped up. They filled up practically every possible space in lines that stretched from Costco #144 all the way to South Van Ness. I’m guessing this occurred anywhere from mid-to-late November 2015 to early December at the latest.

And this is the other side of the street closer to 10th Street at the end of December:

I’ll tell you, most of these hundreds of people are NOT bike thieves.

So why did they show up here at the end of 2015?

The Holidays? I could see why the SFPD et al might want to ignore things until after Thanksgiving, Christmas and whatnot.

El Nino? This would be a good place to stay out of most of the rain, of course, and the forecast was for lots of it coming soon.

Super Bowl 50? The corporate party part of Super Bowl 50 had lots of knock-on effects for SFGov – it seemed like each and every SF Department was gearing up. At the time I thought, well, this doesn’t look too good either, if this is the alternative to homeless people hanging out near Super Bowl City in the Financial.

Availability of Tents? I remember seeing truck upon truck delivering stuff here, something like an FM radio station with “Chuy in the Morning” written on the side, something like that. So sure, food, but tents too? IDK.